For a great number of driver assistance systems, a detailed detection of the environment is essential. If a fully automated drive mode is supposed to be executed, which can be executed particularly without the presence of the driver in the motor vehicle, this is only possible if exact information about the motor vehicle environment is available. If the environment is supposed to be detected with sufficient precision exclusively by the vehicle's own sensors, a highly elaborate sensor system is required. In addition, complex driving situations are possible, during which basically no sufficient detection of the environment solely by the vehicle's own sensor system is possible because, for example, certain environmental areas can be concealed. This problem, for example, is highly relevant in case of an automatic guidance of motor vehicles through parking garages and underground parking facilities, because in them, relevant areas can be concealed by walls, pillars, and/or other motor vehicles.
It is therefore known to receive and analyze sensor data from other motor vehicles or infrastructure devices. For example, document DE 10 2008 042 565 A1 discloses a method for operating a driver assistance device, wherein sensor data about a traffic situation are provided to the driver assistance device by at least one external device. These can be provided by sensors of other vehicles or by infrastructure devices.
A similar approach is also known from document DE 10 2014 214 505 A1. According to this document, sensor data primarily from the vehicle's own sensor systems are used for generating an environment model, but sensor data from other vehicles or infrastructural sensor systems can also be used.
The described approach is disadvantageous because the motor vehicle itself is supposed to detect relevant data sources and analyze the data provided by said sources. However, in complex driving situations, it can be relatively elaborate to detect which sensor data are even relevant for a given driving situation. As a result, a multiplicity of irrelevant sensor information must also be processed. Thus, the processing workload in the vehicle increases, which, in some circumstances, can also lead to extended response times by driver assistance systems that analyze said sensor data. In addition, sensor data from other vehicles can only be provided if their sensors are also operated. Usually, this is not the case with parked motor vehicles in underground or other parking garages. As a result, typically only the sensor data from infrastructural sensors are available as external sensor data in corresponding driving situations.
The features and advantages of the present embodiments will become more apparent from the detailed description set forth below when taken in conjunction with the drawings, in which like reference characters identify corresponding elements throughout. In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.